Reddit filed its S-1 last week, the actual paperwork ahead of finally going public after what feels like a decade of "will they, wont they." Buried in there, past all the usual IPO boilerplate about risk factors and share classes, is a detail that's been rattling around my head since I read it: Reddit has a deal with Google worth something like $60 million a year, and the product being sold is basically me. Well, me and everyone else who's ever typed a comment into that site.
I've had my Reddit account since 2010, a year before this blog even existed. Thousands of comments. Arguments about programming languages I don't even use anymore, a genuinely embarrassing number of posts in a subreddit about mechanical keyboards, at least one deleted rant about a landlord that I'm sure is sitting in some archive somewhere. All of that, it turns out, is training data now. Not hypothetically, not "could be used to," but literally licensed, for cash, to a company building an AI model.
I don't think this is some grand betrayal, to be clear. Reddit is a business, it needs revenue beyond ads, and honestly if anyone was going to figure out how to monetize seventeen years of humans arguing with each other for free, it was going to be Reddit and not, like, me. But there's something a little funny about it too. I spent probably a thousand hours over the years writing comments for an audience of maybe six people and a handful of bots, and now that exact same material has a dollar figure attached to it, and none of that dollar figure is coming anywhere near me.
What gets me is the asymmetry. Reddit's whole pitch to users, forever, has been "we're not like the other platforms, we're weird and community-run and the mods are volunteers who do it out of love." Which is true! And also apparently compatible with quietly signing a nine-figure-adjacent data licensing deal the same year you're trying to convince Wall Street your user base is an asset worth owning. Both things can be real at once. I just wish I'd known which hat I was supposed to be wearing when I wrote all that stuff.
A quick aside on old comments
This is unrelated to the IPO exactly but it's connected in my head: I went and looked at some of my oldest comments after reading about the Google deal, mostly out of morbid curiosity, and it is a genuinely strange experience reading yourself from fourteen years ago. Different opinions on basically everything. Worse jokes. One comment where I confidently explained something about RSS feeds that I'm pretty sure was wrong even at the time. None of it was written thinking a language model might someday chew through it looking for patterns. It was written for a stranger on the internet at 1am. Feels different, retroactively, to know it has a second audience now.
Anyway. The filing also has the usual startup-going-public stuff, the daily active user numbers, the warnings about moderator burnout as an actual disclosed business risk (which, fair), the plan to list under the ticker RDDT. None of that is what stuck with me. What stuck with me is that the site I've used to kill time since I was in my twenties has apparently been quietly valuable this whole time, just not to me directly, and I only found out because a lawyer had to disclose it.
I'm not deleting my account or anything dramatic like that. I'm not even mad, really. I just keep thinking about how much of what any of us write online for free eventually turns out to be worth something to somebody, and how you basically never find out until years later, in a filing, in a footnote, in a number with a dollar sign in front of it that has nothing to do with you.